little white truths: Recycling household things for kids: save money, your sanity and the environment

Recycling household things for kids: save money, your sanity and the environment

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I sat down today to write my 2018 life resolutions (not to be confused with my panning resolutions, which I've already done) and realised that everything I was thinking about had to do with getting better at recycling, reusing and re-purposing things for my kids - so I thought why not share the tips and tricks I've learned in my (almost) three years as a mum.

I don't do a lot of motherhood posts but I would like to start expanding on the kinds of posts I write. I used to be better at that and I often posted on things like travel, writing, food etc, but I've been stuck pretty firmly in the beauty space for the last two years. Perhaps it's time to spread things further (there you go, there's a life resolution for you).

Anyhoo! One of my mottos is: 'Nothing gets wasted.' I've always been like this and it travels into everything I do, so it's no surprise that I'm a project panner - but that side of me has come out in parenting, too.

Noise and mess minimisation, keeping costs down, making a more environmentally friendly household, making your kids' games safer and more 'gently' destructive...

Here are some ideas you may find useful.

Junk mail

If you're anything like us, you have a 'no junk mail' sign on your letterbox but you still wind up with all sorts of random stuff anyway. This also applies to fliers you may find on your car windscreen or brochures you find in your shopping bag that you didn't ask for.

Don't throw it straight into the recycling bin. What I've been doing ever since my daughter was old enough to turn pages on her own (both my kids love doing that), is rushing inside with a big smile on my face and saying: 'Look, look! There's a letter for you too!'

Then I hand her the junk mail and she takes it with glee before rushing to her chair and starting to 'read' it. Nothing is more exciting to a child than getting letters 'addressed' to them like Mum and Dad, trust me. You can use flyers, takeaway menus, magazines, brochures, whatever for this. I hand them to my son too and he sits and plays with them as well.

What usually happens within a day or two is that one or both of them destroys the item by tearing it up and/or drawing all over it - but you know what? By then at least it's served some kind of purpose, and if they're drawing all over the junk mail and ripping that to shreds, then they're not destroying yet another book. Winning.

Egg cartons

You know how kids like trying to put things inside other things, no matter whether or not they'll fit? Egg cartons provide a wealth of possibility for this activity, so don't automatically throw them into the bin either.

The first time I gave my daughter an egg carton, she immediately started stacking things in the egg-cradles - puzzle pieces, balls, smaller dolls and cars etc. Egg cartons have plenty of holes/cradles, which means you'll get at least ten minutes to sit down and have your tea before they're on to the next thing ; )

And yes, you can also draw on and destroy an egg carton (see my comments above), which gives them something else that's 'safe' to attack. Plus you can always slice the bottoms off the egg-cradles and invert the carton, so then they've got a bunch of open holes to drop things into (eg small wooden blocks) - which will make some much-coveted noise, but not so much noise because they're not throwing or dropping things from a large height or distance. Give them lesser noise evils and you might avoid a few greater ones.

You can also stack the egg carton on a slanted book (stack the book on something else at one end) and cut a hole in the lower side. Put things inside the holes you made earlier and watch them slide out the chute at the bottom. Really, the egg-carton possibilities are endless.

The other benefit of egg cartons is that your kids aren't trying to stuff things inside actual toys (like cardboard blocks) and therefore busting them so you're forever fixing them with tape or glue. Sure, you'll still be fixing things, but you might reduce your workload if you get creative with the things you give them to destroy!

Boxes (small)

Here I'm talking about the boxes that your skincare or makeup might come in, or things from the pantry like boxes containing muesli or fruit bars etc. Don't throw them straight into the bin.

I always keep these kinds of boxes and I save them for when my son (he's one) is getting bored with his toys and starts grizzling. I hand him a few. He loves them. He'll play with them, bang them around, try to open them and stack them like blocks.

When he's bored of them I'll give them to my daughter and she'll either destroy them or draw all over them (are you noticing a theme here about giving them safe/unimportant things to destroy/deface?!), then once she's done that I'll cut them open so she can draw on the inside.

After that I often help her tear them up (if you can't beat 'em, join 'em) or cut them up for her, and then they can be 'confetti'. Throw them into the air with your kids, laugh with them, make it a game. Kids love seeing parents 'behaving badly' or being clowns.

Sure it creates mess, but I would much rather sweep up bits of cardboard than I would bits of food or drink. It's a lot easier to clean dry mess than wet mess, and it's a lot faster to sweep up cardboard than it is to scrub crayon off the walls.

Boxes (medium and large)

By this I mean the boxes that might be holding something you've ordered online, or the ones that have held something like the bike your kid got for Christmas or your new washing machine.

The large ones make great tunnels. Open up both the top and bottom ends and watch your kids crawl through them. Or stack/slant them (in egg carton fashion) on one of your outside chairs and watch them put their toy cars or trucks up the top so they can roll down and fire out the lower end. Hours of fun. When they're destroyed, your kids can still draw all over them etc (see above).

With the medium-sized ones, keep them until you've got a few. Tape them back together and label them with numbers and/or letters of the alphabet. Get them to stack them in order. Older kids might want to paint them.

Keep them. When you have enough, there's a lot you can do with a bundle of boxes. Make a cubby house out of them. Make a wall outside and then let them have fun kicking them down. That's more safe destruction because they're not smashing things that could break or hurt themselves/others because boxes aren't heavy or hard. And again, they make noise but not much of it.

The other benefit of this is that if they leave a few stray boxes outside overnight and you don't find them, it doesn't matter if it rains and they get wet. We've had a few toys that have suffered from being rained on, so again, it's all about 'harm minimisation'.

Containers (bottles)

By this I mean things like plastic milk bottles or empty bottles of shampoo, drinks (eg water bottles), body lotion, face cream - you name it.

Don't throw them in the bin: keep them. If anything has a small cap and your kids are still at the 'choking hazard' age, discard the cap and keep the bottles.

Bottles make great 'skittles'. Stand them like bowling pins and grab a ball, roll it for your kid and show them what happens when you hit the skittles. Hours of fun.

Put a few in the bath. Show your kid what happens when you put a bottle underwater and it starts glugging as all the air-bubbles flee to the surface. My daughter loves sitting in the bath and pouring water from one bottle into another. She's been doing this for the past year; she never tires of it.

Plus it's fun (apparently) to put your crayons into a bottle and shake them - again, noise but not too much noise - or to stuff the cardboard confetti you made earlier into the bottle. And if I say 'don't put your confetti in there darling, you won't be able to get it out again', then she'll stare at me in defiance and keep doing it until she can't stuff in no more, so by then she's already cleaned up half the mess for me. Bonus.

I've also given her a couple of spray bottles that used to contain face mists. I usually fill these with either rainwater (see below) or with the water she's left in her bath bottles (see above). No point wasting drinking water. She loves spraying these onto surfaces and 'cleaning' them with a tea-towel, or using them to 'water' the garden. And when she starts getting naughty and spraying water where she shouldn't, there's only so much mess she can make with a spray bottle before I have time to take it from her. It's a lot better than the mess she can make in all of 0.25 seconds with her water bottle. The spray mechanism slows her down. Double bonus.

Containers (other)

By this I mean things like plastic ice-cream tubs, or small-to-large tubs (made of plastic, wood or tin) that might have once contained candles, face masks, creams, body butter etc.

Keep them. Clean them out. Both my kids love putting one inside the other like Russian dolls. They love rolling them around. The lids make good Frisbees for outside, or I let them roll the round ones along the floor inside. You can smash a couple of plastic or tin lids together like those percussion clanger saucer thingies (what are they called?!). If you put smaller, deeper lids over your kids' ears, they can hear the ocean. Noise and harm minimisation again.

With ice-cream tubs, you can give them a bunch of pegs and peg them around the rim of the tub. More hours of fun, and it's good for developing their motor-skills (or at least, I think it is - it's not like I'm an expert on child development ; )).

I'll also put some rainwater in an ice-cream tub in summer (we're lucky to have a rainwater tank, but you don't need one - just leave some tubs outside next time it rains) and I've taught my daughter to put her hands in one of these and put hand-prints all over our outside brick walls and wooden fences. It looks like mess so it's fun, but it's not real mess. You can also give your kid a paint brush and have them paint everything outside in rainwater. Fool them into thinking they're making mess everywhere but they're not because the sun dries it for you.

Of course, my daughter will eventually get soaking wet and sometimes she'll start making mud pies so she's dirty as hell. But water dries. Her clothes dry themselves in the sun. You can always intervene once the mud pies start if you can't live with that, but I have a pretty high tolerance for outdoors mess. Her clothes need a wash anyway, who cares. The mud will dry and sure I'll have to sweep it up, but she throws dirt everywhere outside anyway so what's a bit more?

In sum

Ok, so I could keep going here but I think it's time to stop because I'll start boring you if I haven't already.

I guess the main thing to take from this post is to observe your own kids and work out what household things you can use to 'feed into' the things they love to do anyway. Give them noise and mess and destruction to make that you can live with. And recycle, reuse and re-purpose the stuff you have before sending it to the bin. Most recycling material isn't 'dead' yet.

Also, stop buying so many toys and ask family members and friends to stop buying so many for your kids. Most children don't need any more of that kind of stuff, at least for now. Instead ask family and friends to save things like boxes and bottles and egg cartons for you. Get them to wrap them up in recycled gift wrap (I often wrap things in recycled paper for my kids - it just adds to the fun and the ceremony of it).

If you think I'm mad, let me end on a little story:

When I had my son, my mum suggested buying something for my daughter as a present 'from the baby'. Great idea. Mum did that (bless her) so my daughter had a new toy 'from the baby'.

I didn't. I took some recycled paper and sticky tape into hospital with me. I'd done it before so I was prepared. You know those 'baby showbags' they hand out in hospital (or at least they do in Australia)?, I pulled out all the baby/mum magazines and flyers and what have you and wrapped them. Mex and I saved the little cereal boxes they served every morning (we ordered them but didn't eat them - Corn Flakes work best because of the colourful picture of the rooster on the box), and we also saved the little containers of jam that we didn't use. Everything got wrapped.

We went home. Mum gave my daughter the present 'from the baby'. My daughter opened it and we thanked Grandma. It was a toy, but I don't remember what it was. Probably my daughter doesn't either.

I handed my daughter our stack of stuff 'from the baby'. I remember the look on my parents' and mother-in-law's face as my daughter opened the piles of random paraphernalia that I was never going to read, the four boxes of Corn Flakes, the little jams. The adults thought I'd lost the plot. They exchanged glances between themselves.

But then.

We all watched as Mum's present was discarded. I don't even know if we still have it, whatever it was. The Corn Flakes were apparently the most exciting thing my daughter had ever seen. They made a good noise when she shook them. We opened one of them and she ate them like chips. We let her dunk some into one of the little jams. Gosh it was messy and fun. When she'd had enough, she threw the rest of the Corn Flakes onto the floor. That was fun, too. So was jumping on them: they made a tremendous crackling noise when she did so. Dry mess, who cares. Easy to clean.

For the next few days (until we ran out), she was asking for Corn Flakes and jam as soon as she woke up. The grandparents came to help out for a few hours in those early days after having my son, and whenever they arrived, my daughter was usually flicking through the maternity magazines, or drawing on them, or tearing them up, or making confetti. She wasn't playing with her toys.

I'm telling you this story for only one reason, so please don't take it any other way: nothing gets wasted. Use what you have. Get creative. Find things around the house to make some fun for your kids. Better still, hand them things and let them use their own imaginations to make their own fun - they don't need you for that. There are few greater skills that any of us can learn than to make our own fun from the space that we're in, with the things that are around us every day. Too much manufactured entertainment isn't good for anyone.

Do what you can for the environment in your daily lives. If you can afford it, donate money to kids in need instead of buying new toys for your own children (or even buy toys to be donated to kids in need), and use what you have for your own kids. Sure, buying new toys for your children is sometimes fun for them and you, but there's a saturation point.

And looking around our living room, we've hit that point. I'm sure we're not the only ones.

Hope all's well with you, and speak soon x

* All images courtesy of unsplash.com

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Little White Truths

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