Pants Free Parenting: My attempt to be green go south

I love the world. I do. I love trees, grass, and the watery light of early morning. But having two kids feels like I'm personally covering the gulf coast in oil.

When my daughter was born, I was determined to keep cleaning with my homemade vinegar and tea tree oil concoctions. I also bought a lot of cloth diapers and a sense of superiority. This, like all my parenting plans, worked for a while. I used cloth diapers until my daughter was potty trained, but the cleaning solutions weren't cutting it.

As a baby my daughter had the charming habit of puking on our stairs. She would wait until I was carrying her up to her room and let out a little vomit right over my shoulder. As a result, by the time she was 2, the stairs were covered in milky white stains. I tried scrubbing them with all manner of environmentally friendly cleaners, but to no avail. Finally, I broke down, bought some Mr. Clean and scrubbed the hell out of them. It worked. I got delirious with cleaning power and scrubbed down every surface of my home with all of the chemicals.

My son was the one who broke me of my adherence to cloth diapers. The kid poops three times a day and has a tendency to eat soap, which ups his fecal output. At night, he was peeing through cloth diapers stacked three deep. I finally caved when one night, I saw diapers on clearance at Target. Maybe we just need a trial separation, I justified. That was when he was 9 months old. He is 18 months now and Amazon delivers Pampers to our house once a month and it is glorious.

Of course, there are plenty of parents who haven't caved so easily. I know a woman who has five kids and cloth diapered them all. She grows her own vegetables and cleans her home with lemons and scrubbing cloth of her own supremacy. My failure to help the environment, is all my fault. For centuries, parents have been able to raise kids without paper towels or spray bottles of bleach. But when faced with Mega Bloks covered with dried turds, those are the first two things I reach for. I want to believe that a simple solution of vinegar and tea tree oil will sanitize the floor that my daughter puked all over, but I have to walk on that floor with my bare feet.

Ultimately, my baby is the No. 1 reason the environment will eventually be destroyed. He has a spiritual gift for making a mess out of everything. I once gave him apple slices and string cheese for a snack and went to make coffee. When I came back, he was spitting the string cheese out onto a pile of regurgitated apples and smearing them into the cracks of our dining room table. I couldn't even be mad. He had taken the two of the least messy foods and turned them into revolting mortar that I had to scrape out from our dining room table, with a knife and copious amounts of cleaning chemicals.

I sent a picture of the mess to my husband with the words: 'Look, he's disgusting at a sixth grade level!”

I still try. With the exception of bodily fluids, I stick to cleaning solutions that claim to be all natural and green. I use a wash cloth more often than I don't. But cleaning with two kids around is like fighting a foul hydra. The moment I get one thing clean, the baby wipes his snot on something else. Most messes, I don't even know how they were made. The spot on the wall is brown and crusty, but it doesn't smell like poop. I don't usually do a detailed analysis. It's best to bleach now and ask questions later. Yet, every mess makes me realize that instead of having kids, I should have just tied plastic bags to all the trees in Bever Park. It would have less of an environmental impact.

' Lyz Lenz is a writer, mother of two and hater of pants. Email her at eclenz@gmail.com or find her writing at LyzLenz.com.